At The Refinishing Touch our customers not only want to reduce their carbon footprints, they want to know precisely how much they are cutting it. This makes a lot of sense to us. Forward-thinking businesses are always keen to share their innovation and success stories, and the clearest way for them to do this is […]

In a recent post we discussed one of the cornerstones of furniture asset management; inventory management. At The Refinishing Touch we not only provide refinishing, remanufacturing and re-upholstery services, we also help our customers to manage and track those furnishings and fixtures as capital assets, using web-based asset management tools.

When TRT was founded back in 1977, we became known for providing environmentally-safe furniture refinishing services, but times have changed considerably. Today our business is about managing assets, helping our customers to manage expenditure and their business continuity needs.

What makes us different isn’t just the longevity of our materials and finishes. It’s our ability to work on-site, to ensure our customers stay open and productive. The industries in which we work: hospitality, education and government, have little tolerance for downtime and rooms cannot be out of use for days or weeks. Furniture is a vital part of these operations, and it needs refinishing, re-upholstery or remanufacturing because the organization is busy and successful. Creating downtime therefore has a direct calculable dollar cost. If a hotel, public sector organization, or educational facility has rooms of action it causes problems,so we work safely and responsibly onsite.

Our onsite approach is efficient in terms of both cost and carbon. We know that the alternative, transporting furniture offsite, is a waste of time, money and carbon dioxide. We are able to work onsite when many large refinishing companies cannot. This comes as a result of four decades of experience doing just that. We know better than anyone how to minimize disruption, move seamlessly from room to room, and how to ensure that those rooms are back in operation quickly.

Using non-toxic processes are also crucial in working onsite. We don’t use solvents in our processes and our non-toxic lacquers don’t contain dangerous Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). They are hypoallergenic, safe and clean, because we understand how important it is to use safe, responsible products.

Our approach to furniture asset management certainly guarantees indoor air quality and safety. But in business terms, it means quicker processes, lower labor costs and a quicker turnaround on refinished rooms for everybody involved.

Within this A to Z of colleges, we have consistently reduced budget spend by 80 percent and carbon emissions by 90 percent, dramatically saving spend and lowering carbon footprints. Georgetown University, one of our long-term customers, faced bills 187% higher before introducing furniture asset management in its latest project. The University of Wisconsin-Stout saved 286 tons of carbon dioxide by working with us on one project, not to mention two-thirds of initially-calculated budgets.

We produce these results consistently within colleges, hotels and government organizations across the United States and Canada. To date, we are proud to know we’ve saved more than three million tons of carbon dioxide and an estimated nine million trees.

Meanwhile, each of our markets continue to demonstrate increased commitment to sustainability. In education, the facility managers and campus directors that we work with understand that a solid sustainable practice like furniture asset management is not just a smart environmental move, it is fiscally-responsible behavior.

In education the need to demonstrate a commitment to sustainability to students is also important. It’s a competitive industry and students have ever-higher expectations for welcoming, eco-friendly, and resource-efficient housing options.

We regularly connect with audiences through surveys and polls to gather insights. This includes opinions on issues such as sustainability, education, government procurement and industry-specific topics such as Property Improvement Plans.

Recently we asked present and past students if they would be willing to pay more to live in an environmentally-friendly dorm. A fifth of respondents said yes, while two-fifths said they would depending on the cost. If you take this as a snapshot of attitudes, it shows that up to two-thirds of students would support – ethically as well as financially – a commitment to sustainable practices.

There is an opportunity here, which we know from the tens of thousands of rooms on college campuses we have updated. Some universities have begun implementing sustainable practices on a smaller scale: recycling bins, energy-efficient lighting, eco-friendly take out bags. But there remains a massive opportunity to educate students on sustainable furniture asset management. Figuratively- and literally-speaking, there is room for improvement.

As sustainability continues to be a topic of national discussion, young adults are becoming more opinionated. A greener grading than your competitors may not only bring in more students, but more revenue, and show asset management at its best.

In previous posts we have shared our views on furniture asset management as environmental and fiscally responsible behavior. We discussed the need to maximize opportunities to reuse resources, minimize waste, and to take stock and understand the value of current furniture assets.

Which brings us to one of the cornerstones of furniture asset management; inventory management. We help our customers to gain visibility and to track furnishings, fixtures and equipment as capital assets with our Global Furniture Asset Management, or GFAM, web-based asset management tool. If you’d like to hear more about this, please contact our team.

Whichever system you use, it’s important to ensure that someone takes ownership of furniture inventory management. We typically find that this is managed by facilities management teams, but it’s important that the ownership is supported and encouraged by general management and also by finance. Furniture is a considerable investment for any college, hotel or government organization, and it’s important that it is tracked.

Establishing an inventory management system for furniture starts with an active database. Note the highlight on the word active. We talk to many organizations keen to discuss how much they can save through furniture asset management that have outdated or non-existent databases of existing furniture assets. They aren’t sure what furniture they have, where it is or what condition it is in. The old adage ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure’ is certainly true in furniture asset management.

One obvious challenge of managing furniture is the ease with which pieces can be reconfigured and moved. This means it is important to track them and to have someone with an assigned responsibility to keep the database updated. Audits are essential. If your organization doesn’t have an updated database of its furniture, then you need to do a furniture audit. Map out, room-by-room and building-by-building, the furniture assets you have, where they are, what they are and their condition. Best practice involves associating the date and cost of acquisition, a practice which your finance team will appreciate. It shows how best furniture asset management practices such as refinishing, re-upholstery and remanufacturing can save up to 80 percent of budgets.

When tracking furniture we consider location, condition and evaluation of existing assets as three key criteria that need to be consistently tracked. There’s no need to have a complicated system as this is about simple quality control measures that will determine where money has been spent, where it can be saved and how budgets can be protected.

Finally, it’s important to consider the furniture asset management best practice of buying high-quality furniture in the first place. Increasingly we find that clients turn to us before they make new purchasing decisions, to ask us for our opinions of which product they should buy; which materials, which finish. We understand the importance of helping our clients to make a best value decision at the moment of purchase, to give then long-term investment protection.

For more details of how we approach inventory management in the real world or to hear about our Global Furniture Asset Management (GFAM) tool, please contact us at marketing@thefinishingtouch.com.

In our previous post we talked about how absurd it would be to buy a new car simply because your old car needs tires. Yet for many organizations with large furniture assets in hospitality, government, and education, that is exactly what happens.

If you are running a hotel, a campus, or a barracks, you need to invest in furniture – and lots of it. This furniture needs to fulfil a purpose, be of a certain quality, be comfortable, and have longevity. In short, furniture is a considerable investment.

The good news is that this furniture is an asset which can be protected. In the 37 years we have worked in furniture asset management, we have helped tens of thousands of hotels, colleges and government organizations to understand how to protect and manage these valuable assets.

One challenge we face is to help organizations understand inventory tracking, one of the core principles of good furniture asset management.

Back to our car analogy. It’s not that you want to throw your old car away because of the tires, you don’t even know how many tires your car has. Again, it sounds absurd but it’s frequently true.

Consider the process of buying furniture. In some cases, furniture is bought as a series of piecemeal procurements, each with a value measured in hundreds of dollars. Yet these combined assets add up. In the case of the US government it adds up to millions of dollars across agencies and departments, and billions of dollars overall.

Without structured information on how this money is spent with details of how many furniture assets were bought, where they are, what they are made of, the opportunities to reuse resources and avoid waste are missed.

As the old adage goes: ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure’. So as a first step, you need to consider how to approach inventory tracking of furniture assets.

Next week we’re going to be detailing some of the best practices when it comes to the inventory management of furniture, as we continue to share our insights on best practice furniture asset management.

The conversation ranged from details of similarities and differences between public and private educational institutions, to how higher education institutions purchase assets, and the ongoing and introduction of best furniture asset management practices. Mario offered some core advice, gained over the four decades in which we have worked in education, about how campus facilities managers can gain visibility and start a furniture asset management program. He also discussed the need for a continuous furniture asset management plan, and how to choose the right materials and processes. We’ll be sure to share the article once it’s published.

One angle discussed was the relation between budgets and attitudes to campus furniture. We blogged earlier this week about the dual-benefits of sustainability and about how protecting the planet is not mutually exclusive with protecting budgets. Everyone talks about the benefits of being sustainable but it’s not immediately linked to sensible fiscal behavior, and we think it should be.

We’ve seen these dual benefits over four decades, which includes a number of long-term relationships with our education clients, as well as with those in government and hospitality.

For example, we have been working with the team at Georgetown University for 15 years. In our most recent project with Georgetown, the project team initially reviewed estimates for new furniture that were an astonishing 187% more costly than refinishing, and the final project was completed at 55% lower than the allocated budget.

Another college customer, the University of Wisconsin-Stout, not only ran a furniture asset management project that saved a calculated 268 tons of carbon emissions but also protected its budget by 77.4% percent, by deciding not to spend almost $659,000 on new furniture. Instead, understanding the principles and benefits of furniture asset management reduced the spend to less than $150,000 – and was in line with college principles of sustainability, recycling and scalability in asset purchasing.

When it comes to facility updates and to maintaining campuses, sustainability and time to completion are major factors in higher education, but cost remains an undeniable factor. Furniture asset management checks each of these boxes.

As 2015 marks the end of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, what has changed over the last ten years?

First, across the globe there has been a groundswell as sustainability is addressed on campuses. Global communities of higher education institutions have emerged to share experiences and work together towards sustainable development and to focus on the role education plays in sustainable development and its future. At The Refinishing Touch we have seen this first-hand. We’ve worked for almost four decades with universities and higher education institutions and each decade we see a greater commitment to sustainable practices such as furniture asset management, and see a greater emphasis on sustainability in curricula as well as its evidence across campus.

Worldwide, 370 universities came together, comprising the Global Partnership on Environment for Sustainability (GUPES) network, committed to implementing environmental practices into their curricula. This may not sound like a huge number to those unfamiliar with higher education institutions, but it is not easy to instill change in the industry. Even UNESCO’s final report on the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development reports these problems: difficulty within institutions to coordinate and implement change; the need for staff development and authorization to enable sustainable development transformation; and challenges around disciplinary boundaries. Change is coming but at a pace dictated by the education industry.

There have been new global networks established by higher education institutions to showcase and share their sustainable development experience and best practices. These networks include ARIUSA, ProsPER.Net, and the COPERNICUS Alliance. Sharing best practices, perspectives and experience is vital when considering new sustainability-based initiatives in education – again, we know this from more than 35 years of experience.

What will 2015 bring? The United Nations is currently reviewing the next stage of the sustainability agenda for education and it is expected to establish 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Once these goals are published we will share our thoughts on them with you. In the meantime, to learn more about DESD please visit its website here. To learn more about our work with colleges and universities, please get in touch with our team of experts via sales@therefinishingtouch.com.

As 2015 marks the end of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, what has changed over the last ten years?

First, across the globe there has been a groundswell as sustainability is addressed on campuses. Global communities of higher education institutions have emerged to share experiences and work together towards sustainable development and to focus on the role education plays in sustainable development and its future. At The Refinishing Touch we have seen this first-hand. We’ve worked for almost four decades with universities and higher education institutions and each decade we see a greater commitment to sustainable practices such as furniture asset management, and see a greater emphasis on sustainability in curricula as well as its evidence across campus.

Worldwide, 370 universities came together, comprising the Global Partnership on Environment for Sustainability (GUPES) network, committed to implementing environmental practices into their curricula. This may not sound like a huge number to those unfamiliar with higher education institutions, but it is not easy to instill change in the industry. Even UNESCO’s final report on the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development reports these problems: difficulty within institutions to coordinate and implement change; the need for staff development and authorization to enable sustainable development transformation; and challenges around disciplinary boundaries. Change is coming but at a pace dictated by the education industry.

There have been new global networks established by higher education institutions to showcase and share their sustainable development experience and best practices. These networks include ARIUSA, ProsPER.Net, and the COPERNICUS Alliance. Sharing best practices, perspectives and experience is vital when considering new sustainability-based initiatives in education – again, we know this from more than 35 years of experience.

What will 2015 bring? The United Nations is currently reviewing the next stage of the sustainability agenda for education and it is expected to establish 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Once these goals are published we will share our thoughts on them with you. In the meantime, to learn more about DESD please visit its website here. To learn more about our work with colleges and universities, please get in touch with our team of experts via sales@therefinishingtouch.com.

In 2015, we will continue to guide and educate our customers as they implement sustainable, eco-friendly renovation best practices. Industry experts are predicting big things for hospitality and environmental responsibility this year – from green guest programs to energy-saving initiatives and sustainable building.

So, what’s been making headlines in environmental news this past year? According to The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), climate change is here and the risks of irreversible, highly damaging impacts are high. The sooner we act on making changes, the lower the cost.

While climate change is becoming an increasingly pressing problem, there is some good news too. According to the article, fighting climate change is getting cheaper.

That’s something that holds true here at The Refinishing Touch. With our furniture asset management services, hotels, college campuses and government edifices save money while reducing carbon footprints. With the understanding that going green doesn’t always mean spending more money, we hope more industries implement green strategies, processes and initiatives in 2015.

Accordingly, it’s great to see that the utility and energy sectors are stepping it up when it comes to environmentalism and sustainable planning. These are large industries with the power to set trends for the masses. In the U.S., many utility companies, such as NRG, have set public goals to considerably lower their carbon emissions moving forward.

The report as a whole reminded us of the need for every company, big or small, to takesustainability more seriously. As professionals in the business of reducing carbon footprints, we’d like to remind you that even if the project seems small; its impact is not.

It’s the time of year when colleges and universities wind down the semester and hand out grades and assessments. It’s also when rewards and recognition are being given to colleges for their commitment to sustainability.

As providers of sustainable furniture asset management services, we’ve worked in the education market for almost four decades. In that time we’ve worked with dozens of colleges across the USA, from Alabama and Arizona to West Virginia and Wisconsin. So we take note of the institutions that have been recognized for their sustainable efforts. We support their mission to be environmentally-responsible decision makers that want to make a difference to the future.

We would like to applaud some recently recognized programs, which include a number of colleges that The Refinishing Touch has worked with:

The University of Notre Dame earned a gold rating for its sustainability achievements from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. Through the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS), Notre Dame has earned a score of 68.52, improving its sustainability score by 17.25 points over the past three years.

Illinois’ North Central College‘s commitment to environmentally-friendly practices hasearned gold-level recognition through the Illinois Campus Sustainability Compact. The college is recognized especially for its geothermal heating and cooling, LED lighting, electric vehicle charging stations and composting efforts.

The University at Buffalo’s efforts to restore and preserve Western New York’s natural environment has been recognized by the U.S. Green Building Council, naming the school as one of the “Best of Green Schools”.The university’s won in the collaboration category for its decade-long work in building cohesion among Western New York’s environmental organizations.

Washington state’s Bellevue College has been honored with a “Champion of Sustainability” award from McKinstry, an energy consulting firm. Comparing August 2013 to August 2014, Bellevue College has saved nearly $10,000 in electricity costs.

As advocates of sustainability initiatives of every possible kind, we commend these institutions for continuously working to reduce their impact on the environment. Education plays a vital role in changing attitudes, and institutions proving their own commitment to be more sustainable are also educating the decision makers of the future.

It’s promising that each year we see more colleges and universities pursue initiatives towards certifications, green accolades and sustainability achievements. We see the commitment to green initiatives in higher education continue in its momentum, and look forward to more colleges and universities earning ‘A’s’ for their efforts.

To find out more about how The Refinishing Touch can help your college or university make green strides, please contact us today.